


The Erstwhile Adventures of Emogene Cabot, Hackeress (WIP)

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, I can't be the only one who thinks she's secretly a badass right?, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:01:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24576475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: In which she runs away for the umpteenth time, hooks up with Hancock a whole bunch (he is just Johnnie then) and steals a sentry-bot from an armored convoy. All this before she comes home on her own, with the sentry-bot in tow. (That's how they got the one that patrols out front of their house).
Relationships: Emogene Cabot/Hancock, Emogene Cabot/John Hancock





	The Erstwhile Adventures of Emogene Cabot, Hackeress (WIP)

**Author's Note:**

> This is nowhere near being done, but I hope you like the little bit I have so far!

She wouldn't remember the name of the settlement, later.  
Not that it would matter; the place would disappear, wiped out by raiders or deathclaws or a radroach swarm. When she and Jack and Edward would travel down that road again, decades later, they'd find nothing but empty buildings, and the shreds of a long-faded flag hanging from a decrepit pole in the center of the place. 

But for now.  
For now, she'd just set foot in the place for the first time, sore, reeking, and bruised all over, carrying a heavy bag full of scrap and with only her rifle slung across her back and an empty canteen on her other hip.

“I just came from that direction,” she said.  
The three old men all gave her disbelieving looks.  
“From ___?” the old man asked. “You can't have! There's an Assaultron that patrols that road! Nobody can get past that way, you gotta take the north road and come back around the long way.”  
“The Assaultron won't be bothering anyone anymore.”  
“Little lady, it's an ASSAULTRON. All they DO is 'bother people'. They 'bother' 'em right to death, with lasers.”  
She held up the stained duffel, shaking it so that it rattled. “As I said. It won't be bothering anyone anymore.”  
A look of disbelief passed among the men, but she only set the bag back on the stool.  
One of the others said, “Holy shit, little lady, I dunno what you did to bag that bad gal, but good on ya!”  
“Thanks,” she said. “Actually, I figured, these parts have got to be worth something. And you're a shop-keeper, aren't you? How much can I get for this stuff?”

The first two old men exchanged a look.  
Then the shopkeep, suddenly smiling a very wide smile that made his eyes look completely empty, offered to look over the things. When he was finished rustling through the bag, he stood back nodding and smiling even wider..  
“I can give you two hundred, for everything.”  
She nodded, and held out one hand.  
The man hastened to get her the money probably faster than he needed to, and the other watched the two of them with one hand anxiously near his belt. He had a rusted pipe pistol in a holster on his hip. She didn't even look at him twice.

Instead of bills, he handed her a bag full of Nuka-Cola bottlecaps.  
For a moment she just blinked down at them, feeling equally stupid and angry; then, sighing, she forced a smile and thanked him. He hurried off to the other end of the bar, and she watched him fiddle with the lock on a drawer before putting the parts inside. The second guy hurried over, as well. They stood with their heads bent together, speaking too quietly for her to hear over the place's other noise.  
She was about to turn away when she noticed a man in a dirty red-and-black plaid shirt who had slouched against the bar near her right elbow.

“Hey,” he said quietly. “Not to, uh, butt into your business or nothin', but you know those guys just ripped you off, right?”  
“What?” she asked. She felt both peevish and annoyed. “You mean, giving me bottlecaps for good scrap?”  
He gave her a strange look, and she had the 'i've got something on my face I don't know about' feeling; but this passed quickly, as he shook his head and said, “Aw, naw. I mean, you coulda got four, five times that much, for that stuff, easy—if you'd gone over to (the one area where they pay the raiders to leave them alone. Beacon Hill?)

“Sorry, I dunno where the hell my manners have gone. Name's Johnnie. 'N you are...?”  
She smiled. This one was easy; she'd rehearsed it in her mind over and over beforehand for days.  
“Johnnie, Gena. Nice to meet you,” she smiled. They shook hands, and she took the time to really look at him.  
He was of average height, wiry and lean, with wavy jaw-length hair the color of brass, streaked paler from sun exposure. His eyes were deep-set, and a pale gray-blue, his eyebrows sraight rather than arched, and his face rectangular and well-proportioned. A deep furrow of scar cut diagonally across his chin, and his smiling lips were slightly chapped. In another time, maybe with more sleep and rather a lot of soap, he'd have been one of those heartbreakingly pretty men one saw in movies, or on magazines. 

As it was now, he was still easier on the eyes than most of the other men in the place. He was wearing a gray knit cap pushed far back on his forehead, and he looked so much like a skateboarder or punk kid from the distant past that she had to blink at him a few times to make the illusion clear.  
“So, Johnnie, since you seem to be the only guy around here not trying to rip me off or pick me up, i'd say that makes you a proper gentleman. Would you care to show a lady around the town?”

He laughed, at that, but it was good-natured.  
“Sure, sure! Ain't much to see; 'specially if you've already come from as far out as (area NEAR where Cabot House is, but not exactly where it is), but i'll take ya around.”  
He was right; there wasn't much to see.

The one thing that had been impressed upon Emogene almost immediately, about this new world, was the smallness of everything. People acted like four buildings surrounded by a banged-together scrap wood fence was an entire city. A two-story house might hold two businesses and be home to four families. The dirtiness would never stop appalling her and thrilling her by equal measure; but water was too precious to use on cleaning up, and everybody seemed to have just passively accepted the piles of rubble, the dust. Brooms from before the blasts were lying everywhere, untouched. Part of her wondered, perversely, whether people stopped cleaning out of resignation and despair, or if they'd really forgotten what brooms were _for_.

This settlement was no different. There was a field of razor grain, a brahmin pen with four brahmin standing around placidly, and a 'tato patch—she wondered if she ought to try to explain that they were actually called 'tomatoes'--tended by a bunch of hard-bitten people who were all wearing ugly rag hats. Everyone carried guns made out of garbage, and more than one person gave her rifle a long, hard look, before she stared them down. 

“Charming little hamlet, isn't it?” she said, and tried—and failed—to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.  
Johnnie made a noise. “It ain't so bad. A lot of people outside the really big towns just set up however they can, wherever they can. It's a livin',” he said.  
She wanted to say it wasn't; that they were squatting on a trash heap and probably would have been better off literaly ANYWHERE else. But she held her tongue.  
The world was different. Maybe that meant that she could be different, too.

“I suppose that's true,” she said. Then, looking at him appraisingly, she said, “Say, where's that area you mentioned, where they have fairer prices? If you help me get there, i'll split the profits of my next sale with you.”  
She was privately glad, when he agreed, that he didn't ask her what she was going to sell. The truth was, she didn't even have anything yet.  
But times were different, and Emogene had decided that if she had to fly by the seat of her pants, then so be it. 

~

Four days later, she rolled over, scooped her rifle off the floor, and bull's-eyed the radroach that was crawling up the wall across from their sleeping bags.  
Another flew at her and she swatted it back with the butt of the gun, and then Johnny was awake and for some reason decided to stick a knife in the thing, which finally killed it.  
She kicked the bristly, oversized little body into the corner, glad she hadn't taken off her boots to sleep.  
“Sorry to wake you up like that,” she said.  
“Don't worry about it,” he said. “Better a gunshot than to have a radroach gnaw my nose off. Once knew a guy that happened to...he went over past Goodneighbor and found a downed synth. Cut the robot's rubber nose off and used to wear that stuck to his face instead...”  
Emogene listened to him, disgusted and fascinated.  
“You're joking,” she said, grinning.  
He shook his head, though, and laughed. “I ain't lyin'. What's that old saying—truth is stranger than fiction, right?”

She laughed. “You've got that right.”  
They quieted down, after that. 

Some part of her was marveling at the idea that she hadn't had to fend off any unwanted advances from him—at all. He hadn't said so much as one pointed flirtatious word.  
She'd still slept with her own knife just inside her vest, where she could have it out and stuck into an offender's gut in a second.  
But if there was anything that was a pleasant surprise about the Wasteland, it was that things had become surprisingly egalitarian. Though, she thought, with giant irradiated cockroaches flying around, and malfunctioning homicidal robots patrolling the roads, perhaps people just had other things to worry about, than trying to find excuses to control and mistreat women.  
She thought about this while checking and then reloading her rifle. 

Johnnie, meanwhile, had only rolled over and kicked his other leg free from his own sleeping bag.  
She saw him rifle through his pack and come back up with a little tin of Mentats, and when he noticed her looking, he raised one eyebrow and offered her one.  
“How old are those?” she asked, curious.  
He frowned. “What? Got 'em just the other day. They didn't get wet or nothin',” he said, a bit defensively.  
She shook her head, and held out her hands in a placating gesture. “No, no, I mean, when were they made?”  
“I dunno?” he said.

She held out her hand, and he handed her the tin; she turned it over and scrubbed away some rust on the bottom with the pad of her thumb, and was equally shocked and amused.  
“You know those things are over two hundred years old?” she asked. “And they expired...well, the 'best-by' date was...” she frowned. “Ninety five years ago?”  
Johnnie snorted. “'S that what those strings of dashes and numbers on the backs of things are? Hey, neat, I never would'a guessed. How do you know all this old stuff, anyway?”

Emogene laughed bitterly, and wanted to tell him that she remembered when things didn't even HAVE expiration dates, or manufacture dates, printed on them. She remembered when there was no FDA or USDA. Finding herself alive now, once those organizations had come and gone, and all the Franken-foods from the '70s and '60s having outlasted them all, made her feel something akin to mental whiplash.  
Instead she said, “I read a lot of old books. Not much else to do, where i'm from.”  
“Ahh. Right on, right on. Learnin's a skill not many people take too seriously, but anything that'll give ya an edge or keep ya alive a day longer out here is worth havin' or knowin', you know what I mean?”  
She sighed and nodded. “TELL me about it.”

~

“Gena, we gotta move,” Johnnie said.  
The way he spoke so slowly, and so calmly, made the hairs on the backs of her arms stand up in panic at once.  
She unshouldered her rifle, but he shook his head without looking at her; he was crouched behind a trash bin, and began to creep backwards.  
A moment later she looked up and saw why.

A troupe of four super mutants was walking down the street, all in single file. They seemed to be talking amongst themselves.  
They also seemed to be coming closer to where hey were crouched.

Fear made icy pins and needles stab into her armpits and groin, and she looked around frantically for an escape route.  
The building just behind them seemed intact; she nudged Johnnie and then crept through the door, careful not to bump it.  
It seemed like some kind of office building, the lobby with mummified plants and broken glass all over the floor. They crept behind the receptionist's desk and tried the doors at the end of the hall, only to find them locked; then they spent a hellish few moments looking for other escape routes and finding none, until--

Until Emogene noticed the computer at the desk was still operational, and still online.  
A few clicks, and then wading through the garbled mess of shredded code that was all that remained of the operating system's security program, and she was in.  
The doors unlocked with a soft, muted click, and they hurried through them. 

“Where'd you learn to do that?” Johnnie whispered, his face wide with wonder.  
Emogene shrugged, smiling a little. If she was honest with herself, it felt nice just to have her skills acknowledged—her mother acted like technology was a tool at best and a nuisance at worst, and never wanted to know how to do anything more in-depth than which dial to turn, or which button to press. And Jack loved technology only for what he could do with it—but even he more often expressed exasperation at her curiosity than encouragement. He seemed to think she ought to be doing something more productive than ferreting out weak spots in companies' security programs, or writing silly code that did things like replacing all the letter 'S' in someone's documents with dollar signs or eszetts.  
“Just, you know, fooling around,” she said. 

She could remember when computers first became...what they were. And how badly she'd wanted to do something with them, to join in on that zeitgeist.  
She'd taken her allowance and bought the most advanced machine she could buy, and read every manual and book she could lay hands on. 

“Used to read a lot of computer magazines, when I was younger,” she said, which was not technically a lie. She was good at half-truths. She lived with her mother.  
Johnnie made an appreciative noise. “Well, shit! You got it down pat, sister. What'd you do, anyway?”  
“Turned off their security system and unlocked the doors. Looks like they've got sentry guns here somewhere, and I want the parts. This time, would you mind coming with me when I sell the stuff? I don't really feel like getting conned out of money again. Of course i'll split it with you, fifty-fifty.”  
“Sure, sure!” he said, cheerfully. He slung his shotgun over his shoulder, and they spent a peaceable few minutes raiding the place of anything mechanical that they could lift and stuff into a bag. 

“There's easier ways to cripple yourself than trying to lug all that,” Johnnie said, after they crammed the second typewriter into the bag. “Come on, lemme carry some of it. It's no good if you can't run when you might need to,” he added.  
It was as simple as that. No talk of how she was too feeble or fragile to carry it herself. No offer made out of backwards, false 'chivalry'.


End file.
